CU team part of new 'Reinvent the Toilet Challenge'

Call it a research lavatory: University of Colorado scientists have been awarded a $780,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to build a waterless, solar-powered toilet.

CU secured the grant through the "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge," which in a promotional video calls on scientists to, well, "get their (expletive) together" and come up with innovative sanitation solutions. Complex plumbing systems and a lack of water have caused 40 percent of the world to go without sanitary bathrooms.

CU environmental engineering professor Karl Linden will lead the Boulder campus project that uses concentrated sunlight -- which is focused with a solar dish and concentrator -- to disinfect waste and produce biological charcoal, or biochar. The highly porous material can then replace chemical fertilizers and help improve agricultural soil.

Linden said the project is student-driven, with CU students bringing ideas and experience to the project.

For example, Josh Kearns -- a doctoral candidate at CU who has years of experience working in developing countries -- has been using a biochar process to help provide pure drinking water for people in poor nations. Now, the water is contaminated with fuel products, industrial chemicals and pesticides that cause human health problems.

Kearns, who will be teaching a graduate-level class on water sanitation and hygiene, said researchers are eager to help with solving problems in the developing world. For the toilet project, he'll be a technical adviser when it comes to issues such as producing biochar.

An early analysis shows that a system for a family of four could be developed at a cost of less than a dime a day, according to CU.

A year ago, the foundation issued a challenge to universities to design toilets that can capture and process human waste without piped water, sewer or electrical connections, and transform human waste into useful resources, such as energy and water.

On Tuesday, CU was awarded one of the four grants in the second round of the challenge. The Gates Foundation will fund the project over a 16-month period beginning Sept. 1.

Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates (Associated Press file photo)

CU joins last year's grant winners, which included Caltech and Stanford.

"All the participants are united by a common desire to create a better world -- a world where no child dies needlessly from a lack of safe sanitation and where all people can live healthy, dignified lives," Gates said in a news release.

Environmental engineering professor R. Scott Summers and chemical and biological engineering professor Al Weimer will also help carry out the project. CU has an informal consortium of biochar experts, with students working to use the method to deliver safe drinking water to people in developing nations and converting pine beetle kill to biochar to treat contaminated groundwater.

Other projects from around the world include one that uses microwave energy to convert feces into electricity and another that captures urine and reuses it to flush the toilet.

Most of the prototypes on display this week in the open courtyard of the foundation's Seattle headquarters turn solid waste into energy.

The roughly $42 million project started just about a year ago, and Carl Hensman, program officer for the foundation's water, sanitation and hygiene team, said the foundation decided to hold a toilet fair this week to show how far the scientists have gotten in that time and to give them an opportunity to learn from each other and collaborate.

The United Nations estimates disease caused by unsafe sanitation results in about half the hospitalizations in the developing world. About 1.5 million children die each year from diarrheal disease. Scientists believe most of those deaths could be prevented with proper sanitation, along with safe drinking water and improved hygiene.

The foundation expects to field-test its first prototypes within the next three years.

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